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How Much Would Free College Cost for All New Yorkers?

Graduating students at Barnard College, May 14, 2012 in New York City.Credit Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In the magazine’s Education Issue, I write about the Kalamazoo Promise, a scholarship program that gives a full ride to all students who graduate from Kalamazoo public schools and go to college in Michigan. To replicate the program in New York City, to cover the college tuition of all 52,000 students who graduate from the nation’s largest school system every year, an endowment of something like $20 billion would be needed, according to Keith Luke, at the Connecticut-based Commonfund, which manages $25 billion in assets for nonprofit institutions. “Such an endowment,” he says, “would provide for annual tuition payments of $5,000 for each student for four years, growing annually at the rate of inflation for higher education.” Forbes magazine estimates that 57 billionaires live in the city. Mayor Bloomberg himself has donated more than $2.4 billion to favorite causes, and in 2013 Columbia University will finish a $5 billion fund-raising campaign, bringing in $1 billion more than its initial goal. So the money for a New York Promise is probably out there, but it would require one of the world’s biggest philanthropic efforts.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…